Articles by Sarah Laskow

Sarah Laskow is a reporter based in New York City who covers environment, energy, and sustainability issues, among other things.

All Articles

  • Meter-long king crabs invade Antarctic waters, eat everything

    On the seafloors of Antarctic basins, the water has warmed by just 0.27 degrees C — but that’s enough to allow giant king crabs to take over the ecosystem and eat everything they find. These suckers are more than three feet across, and they're gobbling up sea urchins, sea lilies, sea cucumbers, and starfish. They're also messing with the make-up of the sea floor. Check out the (terrifyinggggg) video above: The crab looks like an invasive vehicle in a Star Wars movie that's launching a sneak attack on an unsuspecting, peaceful civilization.

    Sarah Laskow Science

  • Critical List: Obama admin backs more solar projects; Kiribati president wants a new island

    The Obama administration provided a loan guarantee to a SolarCity project that would put solar panels on 160,000 military homes — "the larger domestic residential rooftop solar project in history," Energy Secretary Chu said.

    Rick Perry thinks he's a smart as Galileo. Or at least that some climate-denying scientists are.

    So he’d be pretty irked to see yet more evidence that global warming is real, if he actually read newspapers.

    Sarah Laskow Science

  • Here’s what happens to EPA whistleblowers (hint: it isn’t pretty)

    Marsha Coleman-Adebayo's new book, No Fear: The Whistleblower's Triumph Over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA, tells about the ordeal she went through while working at the EPA in the 1990s. She told NPR:

    For me, working at the EPA was a very harrowing experience. … I was surprised that the in environment of the EPA, instead of being rewarded for being proficient in what you do, loyalty was a much greater value. When I began questioning U.S. policy, I was considered disloyal. And at that point, at the minds of many people at the EPA, I had become their enemy.

    Coleman-Adebayo says she faced racial and gender-based discrimination during her time at the office. But her real problems started when she questioned her supervisors' reaction to a problem she found out about while working with the 1996 Gore-Mbeki commission in South Africa.

    Sarah Laskow Politics

  • Even Tea Partiers don't think environmental protection kills jobs

    Yale University and George Mason University took a deep dive into the relationships between political identity and views on climate change. In other words, they tried to figure out what the hell is going on in the minds of Tea Partiers. Godspeed, brave souls.

    Here's what sets Tea Partiers off from the rest of us:

    • They do not believe global warming is happening. Duh. Only 34 percent of Tea Partiers believe in global warming, vs. 53 percent of Republicans. 53 percent of Tea Partiers aren't even wavering: they know global warming's not happening.

    • Those snowstorms last winter made them wonder if global warming was real at all.

    • They seriously believe there's disagreement about the science behind this stuff.

    • They're so damn sure of themselves!

    Sarah Laskow Accountability